The human eye can suffer a number of maladies causing mild deterioration to complete loss of vision. While contact lenses and eyeglasses can compensate for some ailments, ophthalmic surgery is required for others. Generally, ophthalmic surgery is classified into posterior segment procedures, such as vitreoretinal surgery, and anterior segment procedures, such as cataract surgery. More recently, combined anterior and posterior segment procedures have been developed.
During modern surgery, particularly ophthalmic surgery, a surgeon may use a variety of pneumatic and electronically driven microsurgical handpieces. The handpieces are typically operated by a microprocessor-driven surgical console that receives inputs from the surgeon or an assistant by a variety of peripheral devices, such as foot pedal controllers, infrared remote control devices and menu-driven touch screens. One such microsurgical console is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,455,766 (Scheller, et al.), the entire content of which is incorporated herein by reference. Surgical consoles allow surgeons to manually input surgical operating parameters and store these “customized” parameters in the console memory for future use. Typically, the operating parameters and methodologies are inputted manually using, for example, a keypad or a touch screen, or are downloaded from another console that has had the parameters inputted manually.
While in a surgical environment, surgical personnel in a surgical environment routinely play music or have some other form of multimedia content playing in the surgical room as a means to pass the time more pleasantly and to provide soothing or entertaining background noise for themselves and patients. Typically, the music or multimedia content is played using a separate device specifically suited to the purpose and brought into the surgical room as an additional piece of equipment. This results in both additional clutter in a surgical room and in a potential distraction when it is desired to change, start or stop the music or other content. Additionally, various alerts may be associated with the operation of an ophthalmic surgical console during a surgical procedure. The surgical team may have difficulty hearing these alerts when background music is played using a separate playback device.
Accordingly, a need exists for a surgical console that allows for the playback of various multimedia files (content) that may be used to facilitate the surgical procedure.